While the Chinese government IS corrupt and totalitarian, (and you might call it oligarghy), i would still classify it as a government that has big power, not as a corporation. They have 50 years economic deployment plans (no corporation usually bothers to do long-term thinking), and they seem (to me at least) to care about the well being and instruction of the people or things like growth and redistribution of resources, if anything for self preservation. E.g. they also do stuff like funding universities left and right, worrying about basic research and the like.
Heck, they actually own several corporation. The difference between to own and being owned is whether decisions are dictated by short term profits or not, and for now it definitely seems not. Actually i think the staggering success of the Chinese economics politics in the last decades is that they have made use of free market rules (capitalism, if you like that definition) BUT the government has serious power to dictate the rules and distribute the resources at will. Whether it will stay like that or even Chinese government will eventually be owned by corporations it's early to say.
The fact that human rights for common people in china are not existent or not enforced does not seem to play a big part one way of another. In fact while you can make the case that human rights are sometimes a limit to corporate behavior in the US, (but that is a very optimistic view IMO), you can also make the case that corporations in the US are treated as people, so they can also use "people" rules to have it their way, in addition to paying lobbyists to create the rules they want.
While this is not implemented natively, (or at least not until you use the fixed point tools to auto-generate some code for a 64bit machine), you can do a lot of fixed point math with the fixed point toolbox:
I really don't get how 248 m is considered "very deep". For a reference the Titanic lies at 4000m depth, and there are points in the pacific ocean where the depth is around 13000 m...
Maybe there is a reason why it says so, i just don't see it...
... for example higher education is basically free. But, universities are not a piece of cake, and it requires a huge investment of time and effort to even pass the exams with the bare minimum grades.
The statistics at my engineering school, (up to 10 years ago because now apparently the system is changing a little to make it more similar to other European degrees), said that only 11% managed to finally get a degree and the rest simply gave up.
So you see selecting motivated people does not imply that you have to place an arbitrary financial barrier, which basically selects richer people rather than smarter (or, better said, hardworking) ones.
Agreed, it's 2009. It is about time things started to really work for the user. And yes it will take a distributor to make sensible choices. And, again, yes there are a few limits on what decentralized development can achieve. However given time everything is possible, i am not that sure the story is over yet.
The industry seem to be leaning toward higher-level languages like MATLAB/Simulink, which let you generate automatically VHDL code for your FPGAs from an higher level functional schematic diagram. So you might want to include them perhaps towards the second part the course.
They are already doing that, with some success. Of course windows being bundled with new computers and incapability of running win32 apps (and i am not talking about office) are other pieces of the puzzle for which, i believe, we have to wait a little longer.
I think that especially in the US (but to a lesser extent everywhere else too, given that the economy is by large part a service economy rather than a production one), you HAVE to be narcissistic to compete with all the other narcissistic people on the market, inflated self esteem is sort of expected. Non-narcissistic people are often dismissed as not having enough self esteem, when in fact they are just honest and realistic.
The guys at cyc (look for wikipedia entry too) are already halfway there. Last time i checked there were already something like 5 million facts and rules in the database, and the point where new facts could be gathered automatically from the internet was very close.
Many years ago i remember the founder (Doug Lenat) saying that practical purpose intelligence could be reached at ten million facts....
as a person of science i might only add that i am only interested in having a set of consistent, comprehensive (and, for purely aesthetic reasons, also elegant) laws describing our universe completely.
Once we have the laws, and we agree on them, whether you see an intelligent designer behind such laws, (thereby requiring some sort of "upper" universe in which god designed and implemented the laws), or you just see an universe that "just is", it's completely up to you and not of my concern at all...
I am not sure i'd call that AI. A number of animals like for example insects exhibit an amazing control of their body within a wide variety of situations, but "intelligence" in the usual sense does not have to be involved. I'd call it simply sensing, motion planning and control. By that i don't mean is a simpler problem than AI, (it may very well be harder), i just think it's different.
Autonomous learning techniques can help, to a certain extent, but i personally think that they cannot do the whole job, as control theory cannot be completely bypassed. Animal brains have already in place dedicated motion planning structures, evolved trough billions of years, that allow them to do what they do. THen it takes a huge amount of trial and errors to perfect their "control system". However this is an open issue. We'll see.
By scarcely controllable i meant that when the airplane is hovering like an helicopter its control surfaces (ailerons, stabilator, rudders) do not receive considerable air flow, and therefore you cannot really expect a substantial "return force" on the airplane by moving them. Witout these return forces, you (or whoever or whatever is trying to control the airplane) are very limited in moving the airplane around.
By the way, the other poster (slashdot.org) was perfectly right, sensing (especially indoor without gps) is another huge challenge here. Machine vision (using the leds but eventually even using features extracted from pictures of the environment) can help.
However, even with perfect magical sensing, the motion planning, guidance and control problems cannot be handled by "classical" control and require techniques that are currently on the very leading edge of modern control theory (robust, optimal control of nonlinear and hybrid systems and the like).
The videos are very interesting, especially the second one from the group of Jonathan How. The developmen of control laws that are able to fully control the aircraft flying in those conditions, (not to mention being able to handle the transitions between such flying modes) is a hard problem.
This is due to the fact that the overall system is highly nonlinear, scarcely controllable, (since the control surfaces have little to no effect), and also not very well known in such conditions.
Whenever they can handle this problem in a systematic and rigorous way, (that is without ad-hoc quick fixes), i'd say that a milestone in control science will have been reached.
Anything that is not a direct consequece of some immediate sensory input must be a consequence of some internal state. Such internal state can very well be just a "delayed sensory input" like you said. But is't just a philosopycal distinction at the end.
Pretty much anything that is not too simple has plenty of internal states. You can still boot and run a computer without keyboard, mouse and network card attached, and the same goes for a simple cell or a clock.
of course you have to supply the energy that the system needs to run, but that's another story...
Funny that as an Italian i never had the slightest idea on why americans put the Bologna name on the pork sausage...
Actually, any searches for Bologna invariably returns the city, unless you actually search for "Bologna Meat" which returns this:
American Bologna sandwich meat got its name from the northern Italian town of Bologna. But this favorite of kid's lunches is not the same as the distinctively spiced Italian original, called Mortadella and made in the villages around Bologna, a major trading spot. Traders may have picked up the sausage in Bologna, and the town became identified with the sausage. By the late 19th century in England and America, "bologna" had become the generic name for any type of pork sausage from the Italian town.
Which solves the mistery, except that i would add that "Bologna" evolved to something completely different than Mortadella.
Agreed on b) and c), but ideology, partecipating in a project bigger than oneself, could still be a big motivation, provided it does not interfere with other motivations, that is, povided it does not cost too much.
So, the way i see it, there is only one solution, which is to dilate the time scale as well.
But, imagine space elevators will be common in 500 years, then some no-profit organization initiates an open-source design of a huge generation ship, something the size of los angeles or bigger, for example, that carries enough mass to shield from radiation, and it is big enough to generate some gravity by centrifual force, without rotating too fast. Eventually it could host lakes, trees, houses,... you get the idea.
So, what do you do to keep the cost down ? you go slow, so the design takes perhaps 500 to 1000 years, then the construction begins, so either materials are sent into space, like one kilogram is sent each week, but this is tough, or we hijack a small size asteroid to build it, or both.
How long will it take, 10000 years ? so be it ! Assume perhaps other 10000 years to build the thing, and let's throw in other 30000 for debugging, testing, and because shit happens...
then the ship sails, it goes one AU per year, maybe, but so what ?
The issue is not to get somewhere fast, is not to be there when the next civilization scale disaster strikes the earth...
So, even if it takes 50000 years we can still send out 80000 ships within the next 4 bllion years before the sun wipes out the face of the earth...
80000 it's not too bad, but hey, i'd be even happy with a thousands ships, which gives roughly 4 million years to build each one.
I know, i am assuming a LOT, especially on the capabilities of human beings of caying out projects with such a bigger time scale, but, all things considered, why rule it out ??
Both parents are right, there are a few things still lacking in linux, from an average end user perspective, AND there is the market share issue.
Parent said:
>> What's going to have to happen is for Microsoft to either adopt >> Linux/open source or Linux is going to have to be so vastly superior >> to Windows for the average person so as to make the 90% market >> share "feature" irrelevant.
Ok, but in order to get in there, the near term focus should be on anything that could help a painless progressive switching, an yes, that means 100% windows interoperability. Without that, there's no chance IMO.
Unfortunately i am begining to be a little skeptics about that, it doesn't appear to me that there are enough people in the open source community really caring about that...
While i agree to a point, i don't believe that open source software development can only be either about money or about "self amusement".
What about the satisfaction in contributing to solve a known problem, or in contributing to ease someone else's live, or in helping the spread of linux, or do just a little something sometimes to avoid the complete and utter monopoly of one single corporation over people's live for the next century ???
I am sure there are developers willing to contribute a little time to help, so, while boring software can be one problem, i still think the overall lack of vision/focus of the open source community is partly responsible for this. Of course wether a very disparate community could ever aquire some vision or focus or even agree on what are the most important things to do (that is without any benevolent dictatorship) is a question that is still waiting for an answer...
Personally, i am starting to believe the answer is no, but that's another story.
Yes you aree right it is about copyright laws. But one of the reason such laws are the way they are is that the music industry wants to reserve the right to charge different prices in differen countries for the same product. These degrees of freedom (for the various **IAA allow a greater gain than would otherwise be possible), It's called "Market Segmentation".
Now in the iTunes case that is probably not true, however the general idea is still the same.
A quick search on arxiv.org will show you that he is indeed very active, since he is still publishing very technical papers. Not only that, Lee Smolin seems one of the very very few physicists who understands BOTH string theory AND other approaches (that is _the_ other approach, loop quantum gravity).
In any case, it seems that many predictions of loop quantum gravity will be actually tested within the next couple of years trough the GLAST satellite, so, we will get news relatively soon...
I've read the article and i kind of agree at 50% with what Gates says. What I think is that however it does not look to me that robotics as an industry could ever enjoy the _same_ degree of modularization enjoyed by the computer industry.
The reasons are maily two. First, robots designed for different uses are going to look, and act differently. Ok they may share _some_ high level algorithms sometimes but that's going to be it, all the rest is going to be different.
So i think we will see gradually more and more robots around, and they will gradually be smarter, however, i don't think you will just be able to exchange parts - or software for that matter - with one another, simply because they (unlike a computer) will be designed top down for completely different purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
It's great that something can be disproved in physics these days, it means that physics it's still alive as a science. I hope it's true.
http://youtu.be/A3oIiH7BLmg
While the Chinese government IS corrupt and totalitarian, (and you might call it oligarghy), i would still classify it as a government that has big power, not as a corporation. They have 50 years economic deployment plans (no corporation usually bothers to do long-term thinking), and they seem (to me at least) to care about the well being and instruction of the people or things like growth and redistribution of resources, if anything for self preservation. E.g. they also do stuff like funding universities left and right, worrying about basic research and the like.
Heck, they actually own several corporation. The difference between to own and being owned is whether decisions are dictated by short term profits or not, and for now it definitely seems not. Actually i think the staggering success of the Chinese economics politics in the last decades is that they have made use of free market rules (capitalism, if you like that definition) BUT the government has serious power to dictate the rules and distribute the resources at will. Whether it will stay like that or even Chinese government will eventually be owned by corporations it's early to say.
The fact that human rights for common people in china are not existent or not enforced does not seem to play a big part one way of another. In fact while you can make the case that human rights are sometimes a limit to corporate behavior in the US, (but that is a very optimistic view IMO), you can also make the case that corporations in the US are treated as people, so they can also use "people" rules to have it their way, in addition to paying lobbyists to create the rules they want.
While this is not implemented natively, (or at least not until you use the fixed point tools to auto-generate some code for a 64bit machine), you can do a lot of fixed point math with the fixed point toolbox:
For example:
>> x=fi(5,1,64,0,'SumMode','KeepLSB');
>> y=fi(23,1,64,0,'SumMode','KeepLSB');
>> x+y
ans =
28
DataTypeMode: Fixed-point: binary point scaling
Signedness: Signed
WordLength: 32
FractionLength: 0
RoundMode: nearest
OverflowMode: saturate
ProductMode: FullPrecision
MaxProductWordLength: 128
SumMode: KeepLSB
SumWordLength: 32
CastBeforeSum: true
The documentation is here:
http://www.mathworks.com/products/fixed/
It is true that you need the fp toolbox to do that, though.
I really don't get how 248 m is considered "very deep". For a reference the Titanic lies at 4000m depth, and there are points in the pacific ocean where the depth is around 13000 m ...
Maybe there is a reason why it says so, i just don't see it ...
actually ... not at all.
After a certain level, too much information is even worst than too little.
... for example higher education is basically free. But, universities are not a piece of cake, and it requires a huge investment of time and effort to even pass the exams with the bare minimum grades.
The statistics at my engineering school, (up to 10 years ago because now apparently the system is changing a little to make it more similar to other European degrees), said that only 11% managed to finally get a degree and the rest simply gave up.
So you see selecting motivated people does not imply that you have to place an arbitrary financial barrier, which basically selects richer people rather than smarter (or, better said, hardworking) ones.
Agreed, it's 2009. It is about time things started to really work for the user.
And yes it will take a distributor to make sensible choices. And, again, yes there are a few limits on what decentralized development can achieve.
However given time everything is possible, i am not that sure the story is over yet.
The industry seem to be leaning toward higher-level languages like MATLAB/Simulink, which let you generate automatically VHDL code for your FPGAs from an higher level functional schematic diagram. So you might want to include them perhaps towards the second part the course.
They are already doing that, with some success. Of course windows being bundled with new computers and incapability of running win32 apps (and i am not talking about office) are other pieces of the puzzle for which, i believe, we have to wait a little longer.
I think that especially in the US (but to a lesser extent everywhere else too, given that the economy is by large part a service economy rather than a production one), you HAVE to be narcissistic to compete with all the other narcissistic people on the market, inflated self esteem is sort of expected. Non-narcissistic people are often dismissed as not having enough self esteem, when in fact they are just honest and realistic.
The guys at cyc (look for wikipedia entry too) are already halfway there. Last time i checked there were already something like 5 million facts and rules in the database, and the point where new facts could be gathered automatically from the internet was very close.
Many years ago i remember the founder (Doug Lenat) saying that practical purpose intelligence could be reached at ten million facts....
we'll see within the next decade, i guess.
as a person of science i might only add that i am only interested in having a set of consistent, comprehensive (and, for purely aesthetic reasons, also elegant) laws describing our universe completely.
...
Once we have the laws, and we agree on them, whether you see an intelligent designer behind such laws, (thereby requiring some sort of "upper" universe in which god designed and implemented the laws), or you just see an universe that "just is", it's completely up to you and not of my concern at all
I am not sure i'd call that AI. A number of animals like for example insects exhibit an amazing control of their body within a wide variety of situations, but "intelligence" in the usual sense does not have to be involved. I'd call it simply sensing, motion planning and control. By that i don't mean is a simpler problem than AI, (it may very well be harder), i just think it's different.
Autonomous learning techniques can help, to a certain extent, but i personally think that they cannot do the whole job, as control theory cannot be completely bypassed. Animal brains have already in place dedicated motion planning structures, evolved trough billions of years, that allow them to do what they do. THen it takes a huge amount of trial and errors to perfect their "control system". However this is an open issue. We'll see.
By scarcely controllable i meant that when the airplane is hovering like an helicopter its control surfaces (ailerons, stabilator, rudders) do not receive considerable air flow, and therefore you cannot really expect a substantial "return force" on the airplane by moving them. Witout these return forces, you (or whoever or whatever is trying to control the airplane) are very limited in moving the airplane around.
By the way, the other poster (slashdot.org) was perfectly right, sensing (especially indoor without gps) is another huge challenge here. Machine vision (using the leds but eventually even using features extracted from pictures of the environment) can help.
However, even with perfect magical sensing, the motion planning, guidance and control problems cannot be handled by "classical" control and require techniques that are currently on the very leading edge of modern control theory (robust, optimal control of nonlinear and hybrid systems and the like).
G.
The videos are very interesting, especially the second one from the group of Jonathan How. The developmen of control laws that are able to fully control the aircraft flying in those conditions, (not to mention being able to handle the transitions between such flying modes) is a hard problem.
This is due to the fact that the overall system is highly nonlinear, scarcely controllable, (since the control surfaces have little to no effect), and also not very well known in such conditions.
Whenever they can handle this problem in a systematic and rigorous way, (that is without ad-hoc quick fixes), i'd say that a milestone in control science will have been reached.
Anything that is not a direct consequece of some immediate sensory input must be a consequence of some internal state. Such internal state can very well be just a "delayed sensory input" like you said. But is't just a philosopycal distinction at the end.
...
Pretty much anything that is not too simple has plenty of internal states. You can still boot and run a computer without keyboard, mouse and network card attached, and the same goes for a simple cell or a clock.
of course you have to supply the energy that the system needs to run, but that's another story
Funny that as an Italian i never had the slightest idea on why americans put the Bologna name on the pork sausage ...
Actually, any searches for Bologna invariably returns the city, unless you actually search for "Bologna Meat" which returns this:
American Bologna sandwich meat got its name from the northern Italian town of Bologna. But this favorite of kid's lunches is not the same as the distinctively spiced Italian original, called Mortadella and made in the villages around Bologna, a major trading spot. Traders may have picked up the sausage in Bologna, and the town became identified with the sausage. By the late 19th century in England and America, "bologna" had become the generic name for any type of pork sausage from the Italian town.
Which solves the mistery, except that i would add that "Bologna" evolved to something completely different than Mortadella.
Agreed on b) and c), but ideology, partecipating in a project bigger than oneself, could still be a big motivation, provided it does not interfere with other motivations, that is, povided it does not cost too much.
... you get the idea.
...
...
...
So, the way i see it, there is only one solution, which is to dilate the time scale as well.
But, imagine space elevators will be common in 500 years, then some no-profit organization initiates an open-source design of a huge generation ship, something the size of los angeles or bigger, for example, that carries enough mass to shield from radiation, and it is big enough to generate some gravity by centrifual force, without rotating too fast. Eventually it could host lakes, trees, houses,
So, what do you do to keep the cost down ? you go slow, so the design takes perhaps 500 to 1000 years, then the construction begins, so either materials are sent into space, like one kilogram is sent each week, but this is tough, or we hijack a small size asteroid to build it, or both.
How long will it take, 10000 years ? so be it ! Assume perhaps other 10000 years to build the thing, and let's throw in other 30000 for debugging, testing, and because shit happens
then the ship sails, it goes one AU per year, maybe, but so what ?
The issue is not to get somewhere fast, is not to be there when the next civilization scale disaster strikes the earth
So, even if it takes 50000 years we can still send out 80000 ships within the next 4 bllion years before the sun wipes out the face of the earth
80000 it's not too bad, but hey, i'd be even happy with a thousands ships,
which gives roughly 4 million years to build each one.
I know, i am assuming a LOT, especially on the capabilities of human beings of caying out projects with such a bigger time scale, but, all things considered, why rule it out ??
Both parents are right, there are a few things still lacking in linux, from an average end user perspective, AND there is the market share issue.
...
Parent said:
>> What's going to have to happen is for Microsoft to either adopt
>> Linux/open source or Linux is going to have to be so vastly superior
>> to Windows for the average person so as to make the 90% market
>> share "feature" irrelevant.
Ok, but in order to get in there, the near term focus should be on anything that could help a painless progressive switching, an yes, that means 100% windows interoperability. Without that, there's no chance IMO.
Unfortunately i am begining to be a little skeptics about that, it doesn't appear to me that there are enough people in the open source community really caring about that
but that's just my 2 cents
While i agree to a point, i don't believe that open source software development can only be either about money or about "self amusement".
...
What about the satisfaction in contributing to solve a known problem, or in contributing to ease someone else's live, or in helping the spread of linux, or do just a little something sometimes to avoid the complete and utter monopoly of one single corporation over people's live for the next century ???
I am sure there are developers willing to contribute a little time to help, so, while boring software can be one problem, i still think the overall lack of vision/focus of the open source community is partly responsible for this. Of course wether a very disparate community could ever aquire some vision or focus or even agree on what are the most important things to do (that is without any benevolent dictatorship) is a question that is still waiting for an answer
Personally, i am starting to believe the answer is no, but that's another story.
Yes you aree right it is about copyright laws. But one of the reason such laws are the way they are is that the music industry wants to reserve the right to charge different prices in differen countries for the same product. These degrees of freedom (for the various **IAA allow a greater gain than would otherwise be possible), It's called "Market Segmentation".
Now in the iTunes case that is probably not true, however the general idea is still the same.
A quick search on arxiv.org will show you that he is indeed very active, since he is still publishing very technical papers.
...
Not only that, Lee Smolin seems one of the very very few physicists who understands BOTH string theory AND other approaches (that is _the_ other approach, loop quantum gravity).
In any case, it seems that many predictions of loop quantum gravity will be actually tested within the next couple of years trough the GLAST satellite, so, we will get news relatively soon
Truth is, spaghetti is just a friendly name for "superstrings", and the Big Bang was just a big "spaghetti" well, ..., "monster" right ?
so.... wanna match evidence ????
I've read the article and i kind of agree at 50% with what Gates says. What I think is that however it does not look to me that robotics as an industry could ever enjoy the _same_ degree of modularization enjoyed by the computer industry.
The reasons are maily two. First, robots designed for different uses are going to look, and act differently. Ok they may share _some_ high level algorithms sometimes but that's going to be it, all the rest is going to be different.
So i think we will see gradually more and more robots around, and they will gradually be smarter, however, i don't think you will just be able to exchange parts - or software for that matter - with one another, simply because they (unlike a computer) will be designed top down for completely different purposes.
I must say that i agree to a certain extent,
on the other hand, consider this,
do you know how species become extinct sometimes ?
One day at a time